Wednesday, 21 August 2013

Hidden down a narrow lane off an old cemetery in Bloomsbury,
two prominent collectors Frank Cohen and Nicolai Frahm have opened a new
public, non-profit exhibition space this summer called the Dairy. Named for its
former role as a milk depot, the cavernous warehouse lends itself well to the
type of large-scale work and installations on show in this opening exhibition
of work by the Swiss artist, John Armleder. He is associated with the
improvisational and performative Fluxus and rejecting institutional or commodified
art. Armleder is instinctively transgressive. Wallpaper and painted walls
compete with hanging paintings made by splashing and pouring paint, resin and
glitter across canvasses. This is not the intuitive expression of Jackson
Pollock or the formal experimentation of British Painter, Frank Bowling, but an
attempt to challenge that urge we have to categorise art in order to seek some
certainty.

Armleder is an active curator of his own exhibitions and
this is evident at the Dairy. He enjoys mixing the work up so that aspects of
interior design muddle the distinctions. Walls are painted with stripes and 12 disco
balls (Global Tiki, 2000) hang from the ceiling in a diagonal progression
across the gallery. Plants sit within makeshift beds made from old tyres that replicate
planting in the yard outside. Boundaries collapse and the gallery becomes a
theatrical set in which viewer becomes performer.

In the ‘fridge’, Armleder has built an installation from
metal shelving stacked with bric-a-brac of lava lamps, old framed photographs
and stuffed animals. The explicit absence of good taste here touches on the
perilous territory of class and caste. But the universal interest lies in the
suggestion of domestic accumulation of stuff that threatens to physically
overwhelm us. Objects also potentially carry memories and aspirations. On a
sound loop, grating Hawaiian music plays its kitsch melodies as if we are stuck
in Honolulu airport. Armleder also piles up old art books and magazines in a messy
heap. Culture and human achievement are reduced to a stack of discarded rubbish.
But it uncannily echoes that desire for distinction between what’s valuable and
what’s junk. Who hasn’t struggled with that dilemma? Ultimately, everything
within this installation begins to resemble a flea market of the redundant,
creepy and worthless. There is the hint of mothballs, the charity shop and the
hoarder.

Such a critique of materials and their associations is most
explicit in a work that curls out across the floor merging metal shavings, wood
logs, bowling balls, art books and sand. Comprising both the raw and the manufactured,
these elements suggest formlessness and precision, functionality and waste. The
pliability of materials and their myriad uses embody the spectrum of human
activity but seem dumped on the floor as a levelling gesture. Perhaps the most puzzling
works are paintings made from simple, repetitive designs like spiders or
flowers, resembling stickers or potato prints. Paradoxically, made by the
artist in a painterly process, at the same time they suggest a universal, graphic
language.

In the entrance sits one of the artist’s ‘Furniture
Sculptures’ a fashionable looking lacquered bar top with stools covered in
various ‘lollipop’ colours. Imitating high-end design, the ‘sculpture’ doubles
up as counter you might find in a fashionable bar, but the piece maintains
Armleder’s frustration of clarity – for most of the time it is an inviolable
sculpture to be gazed at.

Armleder’s work is intentionally provocative and wilful.
Formally diverse and inconsistent, the exhibition conveys the playful
intentions of an artist first emerging from the 1960s. Conceptually, the work
is quite robust as Armleder consistently resists a singular ‘style’ or subject.
He quotes art history while turning
materials and objects upside down. Irresolution is the prevailing theme. You’ll
discover an exhibition packed with subversion, where teasing contradiction
becomes a value in its own right.

Thursday, 8 August 2013

Jose Dávila’s initial training as an architect shapes his practice, informed by the histories of art, design and urban space. At the Max Wigram Gallery,
he takes photographs of Dan Flavin’s lighting strip sculptures and cuts out the
lights themselves leaving empty voids within the photographic print. Sculptural
arrangements in space are thus reduced to the flat page and then excised from
the image. The viewer sees the ambient light and colour emitted from the
original sculptures but their once solid forms are now absent. The space is
filled by underlying white paper within the frame. ‘Topologies of Light’, 2013,
comprises 18 individual images of different works by Flavin, arranged as a
composite piece across the wall. Together, the photographs form a frame around
an empty space. The rich, ambient hues of Flavin’s sculptures remain seductive,
but Dávila disrupts the logic with his interventions. Where the light strips took
physical form, we now look directly at a void more glaring than the original
electrical beams.

‘Shadow As Rumour’ departs from altered representations of
pre-existing artworks. Now Dávila constructs his own sculpture using a Mobius
strip, resembling a figure of 8 placed on its side. We encounter a linear
obstruction running diagonally across the room. Instead of geometric and
mathematical perfection, this object is rickety and meandering. It twists
awkwardly as steel arms slot together forming rough joints. These breaks are articulated
in varying colours of green, yellow and black like a syntax. This infinite loop
hesitates and stalls as if it were a faltering machine. The prospect of smooth
and flowing curves is interrupted and sets up the metaphor of imperfect systems.
‘Shadow As Rumour’ runs as a narrow and even fragile loop hovering between
monumentality and doubt.

This interrogation of histories is now a familiar enquiry
among contemporary artists looking over their shoulder in order to plot a
course into the future. There’s a risk here of repeating a wider engagement
with the past that begins to feel rather introspective though the adaptation of
Flavin’s light works has some audacious flair raising interesting questions
around quotation and comprehension. But it’s Dávila’s invented, rambling
sculpture that is the star of the show.

Monday, 5 August 2013

In a spirit of engagement with the individual and the world,
artists exhibiting in ‘do it’ have conceived open-ended instructions that open
up new possibilities. Ceding control of the finished object or performance,
each artist imagines an action that is limitless in interpretation or time
allowing everyone to make an artwork. Originally conceived by Hans Ulrich
Obrist, Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier in 1993, the exhibition collates all the historic works together, embracing many diverse practices by living and deceased
artists.

As an extension of the show beyond the gallery, Theaster Gates has staged a performance
within the city’s shopping centre titled ‘How to catch the Holy Ghost or Get
Arrested in a Shopping Mall’ using the repetition of a phrase randomly selected
from the bible. I saw ‘my soul refresh’ spoken outside big- brand shops until the performer grew hoarse proposing an alternative condition to
consumption.

Some pieces simply provide succinct one-word invocations
such as Lutz Bacher’s ‘LIVE’ or Uri Aran’s ‘Doodle’ while others might involve
a negation or a position of resistance such as Carl Andre’s ‘It is best to do
nothing’ written on a postcard as a cryptic form of advice. The success of the
exhibition’s concept lies in its endless variation and possibilities for
interpretation. Some works are precise
while others dispense with detail to encourage multiplicity. Individual artists
address progressive instincts for reforming the world while others embark on
absurdity, a DADA strategy of subversion and satire. For example, Andreas
Slominski asks for a lemon to be squeezed against a bicycle seat. Tacita Dean
summons the sublime with a direction to find and press a four-leaf clover.

‘do it’ asks us to consider new opportunities and the
potential of imagination. These works often require courage to attempt the
impossible, the fantastical and the ridiculous. Improvisation becomes a value
for art and living in its own right.

Some instructions lose authority when there’s little at
stake for the artist or the facilitator. Sometimes ideas seem glibly tossed out
on the spur of the moment to meet the project’s criteria. But ‘do it’ admirably
attempts to find a free terrain between inspiration and enactment. It is also potentially
limitless in size and ambition. The audience encounters a flurry of competing
ideas encompassing practical and creative challenges. While it may be overly loose
in some parts, the exhibition also contains rigorously disciplined work. ‘do it’
builds on its conceptual power and leads artists and audiences towards a dynamic
collaboration.

Friday, 2 August 2013

Imagine a grey, rectangular box pretends to be a ship. Instead
of carrying bananas or crude oil, this vessel holds its prisoners in confinement.
A prison, by definition, resists scrutiny. It is a state institution designed
to house those deemed to be marginal and a threat to public order. MikeRickett’s ‘The Vessel’, recently shown at Works|Projects in Bristol, asks us to
consider how the state takes drastic measures to house prisoners. But such pragmatic functionality is transformed as this giant object slips away under the cover of dark to new locations and activities.

Lured by a view of a floating structure across Portland
Harbour and berthed outside a permanent prison on Portland Bill, HMP The Verne,
Ricketts attempts to photograph this ship that resolutely abdicates any aesthetic
qualities in favour of pure function. Seen from the exterior, it has the
appearance of a warehouse, which is its purpose ­– the storage of 450 prisoners.
He tries to get close enough to photograph the ship from the cliffs above, but
anticipating restrictions about photographing the structure, Ricketts takes
advantage of a legal helpline to seek guidance. Such concern for legalities
becomes moot when it is towed away in the middle of the night bound for Nigeria
to house oil workers.

The ship was constructed in 1979 as a pontoon ‘flotel’ in
Stockholm and later used as accommodation in the Falklands following the war.
Identified in its life by insidiously nondescript names such as ‘Jascon 27’ and
‘Bibi Resolution’, this vessel embodies the endless, clerical shuffling of
international, corporate assets. Ranging from factory worker accommodation in Germany
to a New York drug rehabilitation centre obscuring river views, the ship is a
commodity untethered to place, function or owner. The only constant is a residential
barge-master with a passion for loudly playing show tunes from ‘Phantom of the
Opera’.

Ricketts unravels this saga of displacement and reassignment,
with an arch doggedness, illustrating the bureaucratic processes of global commodity
exchange. But at the end of his investigations one mystery remains: where is
the painting commissioned to commemorate of its time as a place of detention?
This picture is cited in a letter written by the prison governor congratulating
the artist for producing ‘a remarkable work and so correct in all its points’.

Collating together a film, news clips and the re-discovered painting,
‘The Vessel’ is a project that leads us through a painstaking and funny journey
to pin down something that is wholly elusive. A hollow container has a function
superimposed and then withdrawn. A ship normally subject to weather, tides and
location, temporarily squats by the English coast. Ricketts asks us to consider
its transitional presence and status. All that remains of its service to Her
Majesty’s law and order is a banal painting that attempts to suggest some dignity
in a structure possessing all the elegance of an electricity sub- station.
Titled ‘HM Prison, The Weare 1997-2005’, the rediscovered painting is now on
loan to the exhibition and illustrates the irony of trying to lend gravitas to
something that is a giant, floating shed. Instead of nautical romance, we’re
left looking at a crude rendition of grey geometry sitting awkwardly in Weymouth
harbour, embodying pretence, subterfuge and evasion.

Mike Rickett’s project deftly
exposes the dry imperatives shaping this ship’s existence. All that remains of
HMP The Weare’s contribution to our national life is an insipid ‘painting’, a limp
description in oil, which exposes the wide gap between decor and its more utilitarian
history. 'The Vessel' takes us on a hunt
for clues, pulling together evidence to suggest ways in which this peculiar
floating structure might be understood. The ship, if we can call it that,
begins to embody the secrecy of government and financial bureaucracies that
take possession of it. Constantly reinvented, ‘The Vessel’ is uncannily
pliable, sailing out of sight from one definition to another.

About Me

I am a London-based lecturer and writer specialising in Modern and Contemporary art. I teach at Christie's Education, Sotheby's Institute and work freelance at the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery. I am also a reviewer for Flash Art magazine.This blog is a place to comment on art and visual culture in London and abroad. I Tweet @Joshuaswhite and Five Senses can be found at http://joshuasimonwhite.blogspot.co.uk

For any publishing projects or media appearances, I can be reached at joshua@joshuaswhite.com. Formerly, I was a founding editor of Metrobeat (now Citysearch), New York, the first listings guide to the city and subsequently the launch producer of the BBC Online homepage.